{"id":1208,"date":"2018-11-20T21:05:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T04:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1208"},"modified":"2018-11-20T21:05:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T04:05:29","slug":"2018-year-of-mookie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=1208","title":{"rendered":"2018:  Year of Mookie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a id='9zIj01UgTBxTkYH39XQZvg' class='gie-single' href='http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/1060717752' target='_blank' style='color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;'>Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'9zIj01UgTBxTkYH39XQZvg',sig:'Rmiu2z6SNSSWU3-8mtk_cGRN8-dDYRLYhzqqf_JUEMA=',w:'594px',h:'403px',items:'1060717752',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><br \/>\nIn 2016, the Kings won the DTBL Championship, a Cougars player (Kris Bryant) won Rookie of the Year, Kings pitcher Max Scherzer won the Cy Young award and Kings outfielder Mookie Betts won the Most Valuable Player award.\u00a0 This year, the Kings won the DTBL Championship, a Cougars player (Blake Snell) won Rookie of the Year, Kings pitcher Max Scherzer won the Cy Young award, and&#8230; yes, you have figured out where this is going.\u00a0 History has repeated itself.\u00a0 Perhaps no offensive player in league history has been more solely responsible for his team winning a championship than Betts was this season.\u00a0 Mookie Betts is the 2018 DTBL Most Valuable Player.<\/p>\n<p>For the first time in his young, but highly productive career, Mookie Betts joined the 30\/30 club this season.\u00a0 He notched career highs in both home runs (32) and stolen bases (30).\u00a0 Those numbers alone put him in pretty elite company, but his league leading .346 average took things to another level.\u00a0 Only one player in league history has had a higher average while joining the 30\/30 club.\u00a0 Larry Walker&#8217;s insane 1997 season featured a .366\/49\/33 line.\u00a0 Oh, Betts also led the league in runs scored with 129.\u00a0 Somewhat surprisingly, he was not on top of the Batting PAR leaderboard.\u00a0 His 11.3 was awfully impressive, but was topped by Christian Yelich&#8217;s 11.6.\u00a0 As an entire team, the championship winning Kings accumulated 22.2 Batting PAR.\u00a0 So yes, Betts was responsible for more than half of that!\u00a0 No other Kings hitter reached 5 PAR.  Not a bad year for him:  AL MVP, World Series champion, DTBL MVP and DTBL champion.<\/p>\n<p>The Kings drafted Betts with the fifth pick in the 2015 draft.\u00a0 Two of the players taken ahead of him:\u00a0 Corey Dickerson and Jorge Soler (sorry, Mike).\u00a0 So far, Betts has won the MVP in half of his DTBL seasons, taking home the honor in 2016 as well.\u00a0 His numbers from this season were slightly better in most categories, except RBIs, the only category where he didn&#8217;t set a career high.\u00a0 In addition to joining the 30\/30 single season club, he also reached the 100\/100 HR\/SB club for his career this season, now sitting at 105\/100 with an average of .303.\u00a0 He is the only player in the league with 100 homers and stolen bases since 2015.\u00a0 And only Mike Trout can top Betts&#8217; career PAR of 34.7 since &#8217;15.\u00a0 There is no question that Betts has established himself as one of the best all around players in the game.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the gaudy numbers, this award did not come easily for Betts.\u00a0 As mentioned, he didn&#8217;t lead the league in PAR, so it is unsurprising that he wasn&#8217;t the clear choice for this award either.\u00a0 But he did receive a majority of the first place votes:\u00a0 seven to be exact.\u00a0 Interestingly, one person did not have him on the ballot.\u00a0 He compiled 82 points, besting the runner-up by nine.\u00a0 Finishing second was the PAR leader, Darkhorses outfielder Christian Yelich.\u00a0 Yelich was insanely hot over the last two months of the season, easily claiming the NL MVP award.\u00a0 Like Betts, he was a strong five category player, beating Betts in home runs and RBIs, but falling a bit behind in average, runs and steals.\u00a0 Yelich was the only player who appeared on all ten ballots.\u00a0 But he received just one first place vote, along with nine seconds, leaving him a bit short of Betts.\u00a0 While those two were the clear leaders, several others received strong consideration as well.\u00a0 Betts&#8217; Red Sox teammate and Demigods outfielder J.D. Martinez hit .330 with 46 home runs.\u00a0 Martinez got a first place vote and earned 42 points to finish third.\u00a0 Right behind him was Komodos third baseman Jose Ramirez, who proved his breakout &#8217;17 season was no fluke.\u00a0 Ramirez actually looked like the favorite to win this award before struggling a bit down the stretch.\u00a0 He also received a first place vote and compiled 40 points.\u00a0 His Indians teammate rounded out the top five.\u00a0 Demigods shortstop Francisco Lindor had a pretty great five category performance as well, but was overshadowed a bit by the guys mentioned above.\u00a0 Lindor made a majority of the ballots (six) and totaled 14 points.\u00a0 Any of these five guys could have won this award with their numbers in a different season.  Although he failed to make the top five for the second straight season, I think it is worth pointing out that Mavericks outfielder Mike Trout has now received MVP votes all seven years of his DTBL career.\u00a0 Even his worst seasons are elite.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/MVP18.txt\">Click here<\/a> to view the full voting results.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s a wrap on the baseball award season.\u00a0 Now it is time to start jumping into my offseason work.\u00a0 There will be plenty of enhancements, but I&#8217;ve learned not to make any promises on what I will actually accomplished.\u00a0 So stay tuned.\u00a0 Happy Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Embed from Getty Images In 2016, the Kings won the DTBL Championship, a Cougars player (Kris Bryant) won Rookie of the Year, Kings pitcher Max Scherzer won the Cy Young award and Kings outfielder Mookie Betts won the Most Valuable Player award.\u00a0 This year, the Kings won the DTBL Championship, a Cougars player (Blake Snell) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-kings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1208\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}